From Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Yes, ACORN has friends in high places -- friends who are still stonewalling attempts to trace where all that tax money went ... perhaps because they know who still has cookie crumbs all over their hands.
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Here in Clark County, Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said last year he saw "rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week," with some 48 percent of those forms being "clearly fraudulent." The Las Vegas headquarters of ACORN, "a Democrat-allied organization," was raided after being "accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with duplicate and false names," the Washington Times reported last fall. The outfit claimed it had registered to vote in Nevada, among others, the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.
The raid "set off a skirmish over efforts to expand the electorate on behalf of Sen. Barack Obama," the Times reported. Mr. Lomax noted ACORN had hired 59 inmates from a work-release program at a nearby prison and that some inmates who had been convicted of identity theft had been made supervisors. "That led some local wags to joke that at least ACORN was hiring specialists to do their work," reported John Fund at The Politico, last November.
ACORN's 2008 Las Vegas field director, Christopher Edwards, pleased guilty last spring to two gross misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit compensation for registration of voters, in a deal that saw him agree to testify against fellow defendants.
Fox News' Eric Shawn reported there were at least 11 investigations across the country involving thousands of potentially fraudulent ACORN forms. Yet none of this was sufficient to block President Obama and his congressional minions from upping federal subsidies to outfits such as Mr. Obama's former associates at ACORN from the mere millions to the billions of dollars in their "economic stimulus" bill last winter.
Only when presented with the undeniable evidence of the "pimp and ho" videotape did the IRS last week announce it would terminate ACORN's participation in the agency's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program -- shortly after the Census Bureau advised ACORN it could forget about helping with its decennial head count.
Smoke? Fire? Washington Democratic leaders have opted to just lay low and not smell nothin'. Despite all this evidence and a request in writing by 28 GOP senators -- and despite the fact the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 on Sept. 14 to block ACORN from bidding for any more federal grant money -- "Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is refusing to hold a Senate hearing on ACORN's activities," the National Republican Senatorial Committee complained Wednesday.
Mr. Reid replied additional investigations might distract lawmakers from addressing more important matters, including health care and economic recovery.
I expect to see when the various House and Senate bills concerning defunding ACORN reach conference committees, that the proposals that actually defund ACORN will very quietly be stripped from those bills. Thus, the Democrats can show "We defunded that heinous group ACORN of funds", while actually doing nothing. Additionally, as a commenter Jason left on my original post on defunding ACORN,
And since acorn changed its name back in June to community organizers international, they can continue to receive funds.
The more things change, the MORE they stay the same. I expect that Community Organizers International will continue to receive the funds that ACORN was to get...all the while Democrats in Congress will say, we no longer fund ACORN...COI is another group altogether...after all, they have a different name.
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